A performance prosthetic experiment designed to explore inter bodily communication through a re-prioritization of the mouth’s sensory function: Taste to Touch. The device allows the users to feel and touch each other's movements with a sensory organ that we primarily associate only with taste. The retainers are placed in the respective partners' mouths with wires attaching the two individuals. As the users close their eyes and begin to move, the movement is translated through the wire and reverberates through the lips, cheeks, and teeth with the tongue serving its primary function of maintaining the contact by keeping the retainer in place. By simultaneously subverting the function of the mouth and tongue while harnessing the intimacy of kissing, the users transcend their sensory bias for sight and experience touching and moving each other in a new way.
The device was designed both for research and to be used in movement-based performances. A variety of wires can be used from structures that spring back into form keeping the users at a similar spacing, to malleable wires that move and bend to serve as an artifact of the movements completed.